Criticism of Howard Gardner's Theory

As Gardner explained his idea, people are gifted with seven separate intelligences. Athletes and dancers, for example, might be particularly expert at exploiting "bodily-kinesthetic" intelligence, while lawyers, public speakers, and writers might demonstrate the traits of "linguistic" intelligence. The challenge for educators is to figure out how to find out those intelligences in the classroom .

However, there are various criticisms on Howard Gardner's theory. There are mainly three main criticism been identified throughout this assignment namely in terms of its objectivity, its practicality, and its empirical basis.

Firstly, many other modern scholars criticize that Gardner's theory has no clear objective or direction. Thus many people got confuse on what his theory is all about because the theory has no clear cut definition on whether it falls under science, psychology, linguistic or education field. Look at the name of the theory "multiple intelligence"; it looks like Gardner talks on a cognitive science theory. But obviously, Gardner does not provide a definition of cognitive science in his theory. Although previous definition was limited to cognition or thought, Gardner broadens the definition to include effective use of the body and thinking skills from social science perspectives. Therefore, this show that Gardner does not have a stand on what he did.

On the other hand, Gardner also claims that individuals posses at least eight independent types of intelligence namely linguistic, logico-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. Thus, Gardner said that each individual has all eight intelligences except that each person has his or her own pattern of stronger and weaker intelligence. Therefore, some educators might suggest schools provide different teaching methods to students according to their intelligence. In this part, some people believe that this idea is not practical. Providing eight teaching methods for example will waste money, time, and human resources.

Another common criticism towards Gardner is that his theories are derive rather strongly from his own intuition and reasoning than from a comprehensive empirical research. Hence, there is no properly worked-through set of tests to identify and measure the different intelligence that exist within individuals. Although, an analysis shows that someone's intelligence can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. But, Gardner's standard psychometric instrument cannot really measure someone's intelligence on some field. Evidence from Neuroscience; for his part, Gardner has never test his theory with rigorous experiments that policymakers in Washington are now demanding .

However, although there are some criticism on Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence, it still been used by some educators to look beyond on the dominant discourses of skill, curriculum and testing rather than just teaching the student in monotonous ways all the time.